Opinions of a Wandering Waif

If the media failed to discuss in detail the law’s less attractive points, it also missed one of the campaign’s biggest ironies. Republicans, with their repeal and replace slogans, stirred up discontent about a law that was basically built with Republican and conservative ideas. That irony escaped the media. Right after Congress passed the law, former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote a column on Talking Points Memo noting that “Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation.” So it seems that, for Republicans, transforming the health law into a bogeyman was more important than owning up to their own solutions for fixing the system.

(Source: azspot)

One of my favorite quotes is from Joseph Schumpeter who said “everyone has elites the important thing is to change them from time to time.”  Of course, this is what happens in a well functioning democracy.  The problem today and the reason why the United States is on the verge of some sort of revolution (I believe it will manifest as a revolution of ideas and not an armed one) is that the election of Obama has proven to everyone watching with an unbiased eye that no matter who the President is they continue to prop up an elite at the top that has been running things into the ground for years.  The appointment of Larry Summers and Tiny Turbo-Tax Timmy Geithner provided the most obvious sign that something was seriously not kosher.  Then there was the reappointment of Ben Bernanke.  While the Republicans like to simplify him as merely a socialist he represents something far worse. 

Of course it is not just Obama.  He is at the end of a long line of Presidents that think they have some sort of divine right of kings to rule.  Think about the Presidency of the United States since 1988.  Bush, Clinton, Bush…If Obama had not won the Democratic primary we would have ended up with President Hilary Clinton.  Catch my drift?  Something is not right here.  This is the United States not some sort of petty monarchy.  There is no divine right of any family or group of families to rule.  When this starts to happen you get the disaster we are now faced with.  That said, the bigger point is this.  What Obama has attempted to do is to wipe a complete economic collapse under the rug and maintain the status quo so that the current elite class in the United States remains in control.  The “people” see this ploy and are furious.  Those that screwed up the United States economy should never make another important decision about it yet they remain firmly in control of policy.  The important thing in any functioning democracy is the turnover of the elite class every now and again.  Yet, EVERY single government policy has been geared to keeping that class in power and to pass legislation that gives the Federal government more power to then buttresses this power structure down the road.  This is why Obama is so unpopular.  Everything else is just noise to keep people divided and distracted.  

Worth repeating:

This is why Obama is so unpopular.  Everything else is just noise to keep people divided and distracted. 

thescrambler:

Via the Business Insider:

President Obama’s administration has been blamed for reckless spending that has put America into its debt hole. But in reality, much of that spending emanates from policies of President Bush, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

They argue that Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Bush tax cuts (along with the economic downturn) are what is driving the U.S. deficit, not stimulus spending. 

The chart presents the ugly truth.

Put that in your teapot and steep it.  =D ~ waif

newsfromjerusalem:

The U.S. position in the Middle East is quickly slipping as an image of Western weakness is convincing important actors that it is in their best interest to invest their future with the bloc of Iran and Syria.

brooklynmutt:

Here are the 25 essential liberals to follow on Twitter.

via Politics Daily

Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other. 

The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief.  More than their political ideas, it is the anger of Tea Party members that is already reshaping our political landscape.  As Jeff Zeleny reported last Monday in The Times, the vast majority of House Democrats are now avoiding holding town-hall-style forums — just as you might sidestep an enraged, jilted lover on a subway platform — out of fear of confronting the incubus of Tea Party rage that routed last summer’s meetings.  This fear-driven avoidance is, Zeleny stated, bringing the time-honored tradition of the political meeting to the brink of extinction.

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Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable.  And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource.  In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you.  I am everything and you are nothing.

This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.  And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury.  All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved.  However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence.  That is permanent.

In politics, the idea of divorce is the idea of revolution.  The Tea Party rhetoric of taking back the country is no accident: since they repudiate the conditions of dependency that have made their and our lives possible, they can only imagine freedom as a new beginning, starting from scratch.  About this imaginary, Mark Lilla was right: it corresponds to no political vision, no political reality.  The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction. 

In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing.  Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists.  To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech — the last already to great and distorting effect.  But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, “a fury of destruction”? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but  frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.

(via)

crookedindifference:

A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.

Republicans, meanwhile, complained that the administration has not been sufficiently involved in the day-to-day [Gulf oil spill] cleanup. Their analysis, of course, is colored by their minority status in America’s two-party system, which creates a strong structural incentive to criticize the party in power, whatever the merits.

The GOP—a stupid acronym we use only so we don’t have to keep repeating the word Republican—will have to decide between a moderate “establishment” pick and a more conservative Tea Party favorite. In reality, both candidates would embrace similar policies in the general election.

I, for one, like it. Follow the link for more.

Nate Silver @ 538 is updating the races, regularly.

Inside Job ~ Don Henley

While you were dreaming, this little island disappears.  While you’re looking the other way, they’ll take your right to own your own ideas.

It was an inside job by the well connected. Your little protest, summarily rejected.

Chalk it up to business as usual.

Humanitarian aid despite Hamas attacks

Despite attacks by Hamas, Israel maintains an ongoing humanitarian corridor for the transfer of perishable and staple food items to Gaza. This conduit is used by internationally recognized organizations including the United Nations and the Red Cross.

Well over a million tons of humanitarian supplies entered Gaza from Israel over the last 18 months equaling nearly a ton of aid for every man, woman and child in Gaza. Millions of dollars worth of international food aid continually flows through the Israeli humanitarian apparatus, ensuring that there is no food shortage in Gaza.

Food and supplies are shipped from Israel to Gaza six days a week. These items were channeled through aid organizations or via Gaza’s private sector.

Large quantities of essential food items like baby formula, wheat, meat, dairy products and other perishables are transferred daily and weekly to Gaza. Fertilizers that cannot be used to make explosives are shipped into the Strip regularly, as are potato seeds, eggs for reproduction, bees, and equipment for the flower industry.

In 2009 alone, more than 738,000 tons of food and supplies entered Gaza. Pictures in local newspapers show local markets aplenty with fruit, vegetables, cheese, spices, bread and meat to feed 1.4 million Gazans.

In the first quarter of 2010 (January-March), 94,500 tons of supplies were transferred in 3,676 trucks to the Strip: 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; 553 tons of milk powder and baby food.

In a typical week the IDF coordinates the transfer of hundreds of trucks containing about 15,000 tons of supplies.  During the week of May 18, 2010 there were more than 100 truckloads of animal food, 65 trucks of fruit and vegetables; 22 truckloads of sugar, some 27 truckloads of meat, poultry and fish; and 40 trucks of dairy products. At holiday times, Israel increases transfers. During the Muslim holy days of Ramadhan and Eid al-Adha, Israel shipped some 11,000 heads of cattle into the Strip.

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